Foo Lim wrote: > > Does anyone wanna try this out? <SNIP> > 8. IDE Hot-Swapping > > 12 Mar (3 posts) Archive Link: Ide Hot-swaping? > > Pozsar Balazs asked if it were possible to hot-swap IDE drives. Jeremy > Jackson replied, "read a recent man page for hdparm and you will see > kernel allows remove/add ide interface. scripts with correct parameter
<SNIP> Foo, one problem I see is pulling the power connector off of the drive. If the ground pins disconnect first, it's bye-bye drive. For a garden-variety setup, the IDE interface on the motherboard _might_ tri-state all the active lines, but if the ground pins on the signal cable disconnect before the write line, the resulting floating ground-reference on the drive could be very troublesome. For example (from experience) it could write random garbage to the platters while moving the heads to track zero, effectively nuking every track on the drive. This could also occur when plugging the new drive in. Bottom line: I'd look around for products that claim to have solved this issue, I'm guessing it's pretty tricky. But great capability if/when someone solves the hardware issues. Chuck -- The man who sets out to carry a cat by its tail learns something that will always be useful and which never will grow dim or doubtful. -- Mark Twain
